No man exercised so much influence on the age. The reason is obvious. On no man did the age exercise so much influence. He was perhaps the greatest of those whom we have designated as the critical poets; and his literary career exhibited, on a reduced scale, the whole history of the school to which he belonged, the rudeness and extravagance of its infancy, the propriety, the grace, the dignified good sense, the temperate splendour of its maturity. His imagination was torpid, till it was awakened by his judgment. He began with quaint parallels and empty mouthing. He gradually acquired the energy of the satirist, the gravity of the moralist, the rapture of the lyric poet. The revolution through which English literature has been passing, from the time of Cowley to that of Scott, may be seen in miniature within the compass of his volumes. His life divides itself into two parts. There is some debatable ground on the common frontier; but the line may be drawn with tolerable accuracy. The year 1678 is that on which we should be inclined to fix as the date of a great change in his manner. During the preceding period appeared some of his courtly panegyrics-his Annus Mirabilis, and most of his plays; indeed, all his rhyming tragedies. To the subsequent period belong his best dramas-All for Love, The Spanish Friar, and Sebastian-his satires, his translations, his didactic poems, his fables, and his odes. Of the small pieces which were presented to chancellors and princes, it would scarcely be fair to speak. The greatest advantage which the fine arts derive from the extension of knowledge is, that the patronage of individuals becomes unnecessary. Some writers still affect to regret the age of patronage. None but bad writers have reason to regret it. It is always an age of general ignorance. Where ten thousand readers are eager for the appearance of a book, a small contribution from each makes up a splendid remuneration for the author. Where literature is a luxury, confined to few, each of them must pay high. If the Empress Catherine, for example, wanted an epic poem, she must have wholly supported the poet;-just as, in a remote country village, a man who wants a mutton-chop is sometimes forced to take the whole sheep ;-a thing which never happens where the demand is large. But men who pay largely for the gratification of their taste, will expect to have it united with some gratification to their vanity. Flattery is carried to a shameless extent; and the habit of flattery almost inevitably introduces a false taste into composition. Its language is made up of hyperbolical commonplacesoffensive from their triteness-and still more uffensive from their extravagance. In no school is the trick of overstepping the modesty of nature so speedily acquired. The writer, accustomed to find exaggeration acceptable and necessary on one subject, uses it on all. It is not strange, therefore, that the early panegyrical verses of Dryden should be made up of meanness and bombast. They abound with the conceits which his immediate predecessors had brought into fashion. But his language and his versification were already far supe rior to theirs. The Annus Mirabilis shows great command of expression and a fine ear for heroic rhyme. Here its merits end. Not only has it no claim to be called poetry; but it seems to be the work of a man who could never, by any possibility, write poetry. Its affected similes are the best part of it. Gaudy weeds present a more encouraging spectacle than utter barrenness. There is scarcely a single stanza in this long work, to which the imagination seems to have contributed any thing. It is produced, not by creation, but by construction. It is made up, not of pictures, but of inferences. We will give a single instance, and certainly a favourable instance-a quatrain which Johnson has praised. Dryden is describing the sea-fight with the Dutch. "Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball; And now their odours armed against them fly Some preciously by shattered porcelain fall, And some by aromatic splinters die." The poet should place his readers, as nearly as possible, in the situation of the sufferers or the spectators. His narration ought to produce feelings similar to those which would be excited by the event itself. Is this the case here? Who, in a sea-fight, ever thought of the price of the china which beats out the brains of a sailor; or of the odour of the splinter which shatters his leg? It is not by an act of the imagination, at once calling up the scene before the interior eye, but by painful meditation by turning the subject round and round-by tracing out facts into remote consequences, that these incongruous topics are introduced into the description. Homer, it is true, perpetually uses epithets which are not peculiarly appropriate. Achilles is the swift-footed, when he is sitting still. Ulysses is the much-enduring, when he has nothing to endure. Every spear casts a long shadow; every ox has crooked horns; and every woman a high bosom, though these particulars may be quite beside the purpose. In our old ballads a similar practice prevails. The gold is always red, and the ladies always gay, though nothing whatever may depend on the hue of gold, or the temper of the ladies. But these adjectives are mere customary additions. They merge in the sub stantives to which they are attached. If the at all colour the idea, it is with a tinge so sligh as in no respect to alter the general effect. In the passage which we have quoted from Dryden, the case is very different. Preciously and aromatic divert our whole attention to themselves, and dissolve the image of the battle in a moment. The whole poem reminds us of Lucan, and of the worst parts of Lucan, the sea-fight in the bay of Marseilles, for example. The description of the two fleets during the night is perhaps the only passage which ought to be exempted from this censure. If it was from the Annus Mirabilis that Milton formed his opinion, when he pronounced Dryden a good rhymer, but no poet, he certainly judged correctly. But Dryden was, as we have said, one of those writers, in whom the period of imagination does not precede, but follow, the period of observation and reflection. We will give a few instances:-In Aureng. zebe, Arimant, governor of Agra, falls in love with his prisoner Indamora. She rejects his suit with scorn; but assures him that she shall make great use of her power over him. He threatens to be angry. She answers, very coolly: "Do not your anger, like your love, is vain : Whene'er I please, you must be pleased again. Knowing what power I have your will to bend, I'll use it; for I need just such a friend.” His plays, his rhyming plays in particular, | rested emotion-a loyalty extending to passive are admirable subjects for those who wish to obedience—a religion like that of the Quietists, study the morbid anatomy of the drama. He unsupported by any sanction of hope or fear. was utterly destitute of the power of exhibiting We see nothing but despotism without power, real human beings. Even in the far inferior and sacrifices without compensation. talent of composing characters out of those elements into which the imperfect process of our reason can resolve them, he was very deficient. His men are not even good personifications; they are not well-assorted assemblages of qualities. Now and then, indeed, he seizes a very coarse and marked distinction; and gives up, not a likeness, but a strong caricature, in which a single peculiarity is protruded, and every thing else neglected; like the Marquis of Granby at an inndoor, whom we know by nothing but his baldness; or Wilkes, who is Wilkes only in his squint. These are the best specimens of his skill. For most of his pictures seem, like Turkey carpets, to have been expressly designed not to resemble any thing in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, or in the wa ters under the earth. The latter manner he practises most frequently in his tragedies, the former in his comedies. The comic characters are, without mixture, loathsome and despicable. The men of Etherege and Vanbrugh are bad enough. Those of Smollet are perhaps worse. But they do not approach to the Celadons, the Wildbloods, the Woodalls, and the Rhodophils of Dryden. The vices of these last are set off by a certain fierce, hard impudence, to which we know nothing comparable. Their love is the appetite of beasts; their friendship the confederacy of knaves. The ladies seem to have been expressly created to form helps meet for such gentlemen. In deceiving and insulting their old fathers, they do not perhaps exceed the license which, by immemorial prescription, has been allowed to heroines. But they also cheat at cards, rob strong boxes, put up their favours to auction, betray their friends, abuse their rivals in a style of Billingsgate, and invite their lovers in the language of the Piazza. These, it must be remembered, are not the valets and waiting-women, the Mascarilles and Nerines, but the recognised heroes and heroines, who appear as the representatives of good society, and who, at the end of the fifth act, marry and live very happily ever after. The sensuality, baseness, and malice of their natures are unredeemed by any quality of a different description, by any touch of kindness, or even by an honest burst of hearty hatred and revenge. We are in a world where there is no humanity, no veracity, no sense of shame -a world for which any good-natured man would gladly take in exchange the society of Milton's devils. But as soon as we enter the regions of Tragedy, we find a great change. The is no lack of the fine sentiment there. Metastasio is surpassed in his own department. Scuderi is out-scuderied. We are introduced to people whose proceedings we can trace to no motive of whose feelings we can form no more idea than of a sixth sense. We have eft a race of creatures, whose love is as delicate and affectionate as the passion which an alderman feels for a turtle. We find ourselves among beings, whose love is purely disinte This is no idle menace. She soon brings a "This fatal paper rather let me tear, Arimant Than, like Bellerophon, my sentence bear." "You may; but 'twill not be your best advice; Poor Arimant seems to be of the same opinion. He mutters something about fate and freewill, and walks off with the billet-doux. In the Indian Emperor, Montezuma presents Almeria with a garland as a token of his love, and offers to make her his queen. She replies "I take this garland, not as given by you; But as my merit's and my beauty's due As for the crown which you, my slave, possess, To share it with you would but make me less." In return for such proofs of tenderness as these, her admirer consents to murder his twe sons, and a benefactor, to whom he feels the warmest gratitude. Lyndaraxa, in the Conquest of Granada, assumes the same lofty tone with Abdelmelech. He complains that she smiles upon his rival. "Lynd. Abdel. And when did I my power so far resign, That you should regulate each look of mine? Then, when you gave your love, you gave that power. 'Twas during pleasure-'tis revoked this hour. Abdel. I'll hate you, and this visit is my last. Lynd. Do, if you can; you know I hold you fast." That these passages violate all historica. propriety; that sentiments, to which nothing similar was ever even affected except by the cavaliers of Europe, are transferred to Mexico and Agra, is a light accusation. We have no objection to a conventional world, an Illyrian puritan, or a Bohemian seaport. While the faces are good, we care little about the background. Sir Joshua Reynolds says, that the curtains and hangings in an historical painting ought to be, not velvet or cotton, but merely drapery. The same principle should be applied to poetry and romance. The truth or character is the first object; the truth of place and time is to be considered only in the second place. Puff himself could tell the actor to turr out his toes, and remind him that Keeper Hatton was a great dancer. We wish that, in our own time, a writer of a very different order from Puff had not too often forgotten human nature in the niceties of upholstery, millinery, and cookery. considered as his best, are in blank verse. N. experiment can be more decisive. It must be allowed, that the worst even of the rhyming tragedies contains good descrip tion and magnificent rhetoric. But, even when we forget that they are plays, and, passing by their dramatic improprieties, consider them with reference to the language, we are perpetually disgusted by passages which it is diffi cult to conceive how any author could have written, or any audience have tolerated; rants in which the raving violence of the manner forms a strange contrast with the abject tame We blame Dryden, not because the persons of his dramas are not Moors or Americans, but because they are not men and women; not because love, such as he represents it, could not exist in a harem or in a wigwam, but because it could not exist anywhere. As is the love of his heroes, such are all their other emotions. All their qualities, their cou-ness of the thought. The author laid the whole rage, their generosity, their pride, are on the fault on the audience, and declared, that when same colossal scale. Justice and prudence he wrote them, he considered them bad enough are virtues which can exist only in a moderate to please. This defence is unworthy of a man degree, and which change their nature and of genius, and, after all, is no defence. Ottheir name if pushed to excess. Of justice and way pleased without rant; and so might Dryprudence, therefore, Dryden leaves his favour- den have done, if he had possessed the powers ites destitute. He did not care to give them of Otway. The fact is, that he had a tendency what he could not give without measure. The to bombast, which, though subsequently cor tyrants and ruffians are merely the heroes al-rected by time and thought, was never wholly tered by a few touches, similar to those which removed, and which showed itself in performtransformed the honest face of Sir Roger de ances not designed to please the rude mob of Coverley into the Saracen's head. Through the theatre. the grin and frown, the original features are still perceptible. Some indulgent critics have represented this failing as an indication of genius, as the profusion of unlimited wealth, the wantonness of exuberant vigour. To us it seems to bear a nearer affinity to the tawdriness of poverty, or the spasms and convulsions of weakness. Dry It is in the tragicomedies that these absurdities strike us most. The two races of men, or rather the angels and the baboons, are there presented to us together. We meet in one scene with nothing but gross, selfish, unblush-den surely had not more imagination than ing, lying libertines of both sexes, who, as a Homer, Dante, or Milton, who never fall into punishment, we suppose, for their depravity, this vice. The swelling diction of Eschylus are condemned to talk nothing but prose. But and Isaiah resembles that of Almanzor and as soon as we meet with people who speak in | Maximin no more than the tumidity of a musverse, we know that we are in society which cle resembles the tumidity of a boil. The would have enraptured the Cathos and Made- former is symptomatic of health and strength, lon of Molière, in society for which Oroon- the latter of debility and disease. If ever dates would have too little of the lover, Clelia Shakspeare rants, it is not when his imaginatoo much of the coquette. tion is hurrying him along, but when he is hurAs Dryden was unable to render his plays rying his imagination along-when his mind interesting by means of that which is the pecu-is for a moment jaded-when, as was said of liar and appropriate excellence of the drama, it was necessary that he should find some substitute for it. In his comedies he supplied its place, sometimes by wit, but more frequently by intrigue, by disguises, mistakes of persons, dialogues at cross purposes, hairbreadth escapes, perplexing concealments, and surprising disclosures. He thus succeeded at least in making these pieces very amusing. In his tragedies he trusted, and not altogether without reason, to his diction and his versification. It was on this account, in all probability, that he so eagerly adopted, and so reluctantly abandoned, the practice of rhyming in his plays. What is unnatural appears tess unnatural in that species of verse, than in lines which approach more nearly to common conversation; and in the management of the heroic couplet, Dryden has never been equalled. It is unnecessary to urge any arguments against a fashion now universally condemned. But it is worthy of observation, that though Dryden was deficient in that talent which blank verse exhibits to the greatest advantage, and was certainly the best writer of heroic rhyme in our language, yet the plays which have, from the time of their first appearance, been Euripides, he resembles a lion, who excites his own fury by lashing himself with his tail. What happened to Shakspeare from the occasional suspension of his powers, happened to Dryden from constant impotence. He, like his confederate Lee, had judgment enough to appreciate the great poets of the preceding age, but not judgment enough to shun competition with them. He felt and admired their wild and daring sublimity. That it belonged to another age than that in which he lived, and required other talents than those which he possessed; that, in aspiring to emulate it, he was wasting, in a hopeless attempt, powers which might render him pre-eminent in a different career, was a lesson which he did not learn till late. As those knavish enthusiasts, the French prophets, courted inspiration, by mimicking the writhings, swoonings, and gaspings, which they considered as its symptoms, he attempted, by affected fits of poetical fury, to bring on a real paroxysm; and, like them, he got nothing but his distortions for his pains. Horace very happily compares those who, in his time, imitated Pindar, to the youth who attempted to fly to heaven on waxen wings, and who experienced so fatal and ignominious a fall. His own admirable good sense preserved him from this error, and taught him to cultivate a style in which excellence was within his reach. Dryden had not the same self-knowledge. He saw that the greatest poets were never so successful as when they rushed beyond the ordinary bounds, and that some inexplicable good fortune preserved them from tripping even when they staggered on the brink of nonsense. He did not perceive that they were guided and sustained by a power denied to himself. They wrote from the dictation of the imagination, and they found a response in the imaginations of others. He, on the contrary, sat down to work himself, by reflection and argument, into a deliberate wildness, a rational frenzy. In looking over the admirable designs which accompany the Faust, we have always been much struck by one which represents the wizard and the tempter riding at full speed. The demon sits on his furious horse as heedlessly as if he were reposing on a chair. That he should keep his saddle in such a posture, would seem impossible to any who did not know that he was secure in the privileges of a superhuman nature. The attitude of Faust, on the contrary, is the perfection of horsemanship. Poets of the first order might safely write as desperately as Mephistopheles rode. But Dryden, though admitted to communion with higher spirits, though armed with a portion of their power, and intrusted with some of their secrets, was of another race. What they might securely venture to do, it was madness in him to attempt. It was necessary that taste and critical science should supply its deficiencies. We will give a few examples. Nothing can be finer than the description of Hector at the Grecian wall. flowers with the bee; or the little bower-women "Shakspeare's magic could not copied be; It would have been well if he had not himself In the bright moonshine, while winds whistle loud, These are very favourable instances. Those If Dryden had died before the expiration of the first of the periods into which we have divided his literary life, he would have left a reputation, at best, little higher than that of Lee or Davenant. He would have been known only to men of letters; and by them he would have been mentioned as a writer who threw away, on subjects which he was incompetent to treat, powers which, judiciously employed, might have raised him to eminence; whose diction and whose numbers had sometimes very high merit, but all whose works were blemished by a false taste and by errors of gross negligence. A few of his prologues and epilogues might perhaps still have been remembered and quoted. In these little pieces, he early showed all the powers which afterwards rendered him the greatest of modern satirists. But during the latter part of his life, he gradually abandoned the drama. His plays appeared at longer intervals. He renounced rhyme in tragedy. His language became less turgid, his characters less exaggerated. He did not indeed produce correct representations of human nature; but he ceased to daub such monstrous chimeras as What daring expressions! Yet how signi- and there passages occur worthy of the best those which abound in his earlier pieces. Here ficant! How picturesque! Hector seems to ages of the British stage. The style which the rise up in his strength and fury. The gloom drama requires changes with every change of of night in his frown-the fire burning in his character and situation. He who can vary his eyes-the javelins and the blazing armour-manner to suit the variation is the great dramathe mighty rush through the gates and down the battlements the trampling and the infinite roar of the multitude-every thing is with us; every thing is real. ο δ' αρ' εσθορε φαιδιμος Εκτωρ, Dryden has described a very similar event in Maximin; and has done his best to be sublime, as follows: "There with a forest of their darts he strove, And stood like Capaneus defying Jove; With his broad sword the boldest beating down, Till Fate grew pale, lest he should win the town, And turned the iron leaves of its dark book To make new dooms, or mend what it mistook." How exquisite is the imagery of the fairysongs in the Tempest and the Midsummer Night's Dream; Ariel riding through the twilight on the bat, or sucking in the bells of tist; but he who excels in one manner only, write a speech. In the same manner, wit, a fell into natural and pleasing verse. In this talent for description, or a talent for narration, may, for a time, pass for dramatic genius. Dryden was an incomparable reasoner in verse. He was conscious of his power; he was proud of it; and the authors of the Rehearsal justly charged him with abusing it. His warriors and princesses are fond of discussing points of amorous casuistry, such as would have delighted a Parliament of Love. They frequently go still deeper, and speculate on philosophical necessity and the origin of evil. department, he succeeded as completely as his contemporary Gibbons succeeded in the similar enterprise of carving the most delicate flowers from heart of oak. The toughest and most knotty parts of language became ductile at his touch. His versification in the same manner, while it gave the first model of that neatness and precision which the following generation esteemed so highly, exhibited, at the same time, the last examples of nobleness, freedom, variety of pause and cadence. His tragedies in rhyme, however worthless in themselves, had at least served the purpose of nonsenseverses: they had taught him all the arts of melody which the heroic couplet admits. For bombast, his prevailing vice, his new subjects gave little opportunity; his better taste gradually discarded it. There were, however, some occasions which absolutely required this peculiar talent. Then Dryden was indeed at home. All his best scenes are of this description. They are all between men; for the heroes of Dryden, like many other gentlemen, can never talk sense when ladies are in company. They are all intended to exhibit the empire of reason over He possessed, as we have said, in a previolent passion. We have two interlocutors, eminent degree, the power of reasoning in the one eager and impassioned, the other high, verse; and this power was now peculiarly usecool, and judicious. The composed and ra- ful to him. His logic is by no means unitional character gradually acquires the ascend-formly sound. On points of criticism, he alency. His fierce companion is first inflamed to rage by his reproaches, then overawed by his equanimity, convinced by his arguments, and soothed by his persuasions. This is the case in the scene between Hector and Troilus, in that between Antony and Ventidius, and in that between Sebastian and Dorax. Nothing of the same kind in Shakspeare is equal to them, except the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius, which is worth them all three. Some years before his death, Dryden altogether ceased to write for the stage. He had turned his powers in a new direction, with success the most splendid and decisive. His taste had gradually awakened his creative faculties. The first rank in poetry was beyond | his reach, but he challenged and secured the most honourable place in the second. His imagination resembled the wings of an ostrich. It enabled him to run, though not to soar. When he attempted the highest flights, he became ridiculous; but while he remained in a lower region, he outstripped all competitors. ways reasons ingeniously; and, when he is disposed to be honest, correctly. But the theological and political questions, which he undertook to treat in verse, were precisely those which he understood least. His arguments, therefore, are often worthless. But the manner in which they are stated is beyond all praise. The style is transparent. The topics follow each other in the happiest order. The objections are drawn up in such a manner, that the whole fire of the reply may be brought to bear on them. The circumlocutions which are substituted for technical phrases, are clear, neat, and exact. The illustrations at once adorn and elucidate the reasoning. The sparkling epigrams of Cowley, and the simple garrulity of the burlesque poets of Italy, are alternately employed, in the happiest manner, to give effect to what is obvious; or clearness to what is obscure. His literary creed was catholic, even to latitudinarianism; not from any want of acuteness, but from a disposition to be easily satisfied. He was quick to discern the smallest glimpse of merit; he was indulgent even to gross improprieties, when accompanied by any redeeming talent. When he said a severe thing, it was to serve a temporary purpose,to support an argument, or to tease a rival. Never was so able a critic so free from fastidiousness. He loved the old poets, especially Shakspeare. He admired the ingenuity which Donne and Cowley had so wildly abused. He did justice, amidst the general silence, to the memory of Milton. He praised to the skies the schoolboy lines of Addison. Always looking on the fair side of every object, he admired extravagance on account of the invention which he supposed it to indicate; he excused affectation in favour of wit; he tolerated even tameness for the sake of the correctness which was its concomitant. All his natural and all his acquired powers fitted him to found a good critical school of poetry. Indeed, he carried his reforms too far for his age. After his death, our literature retrograded; and a century was necessary to bring it back to the point at which he left it. The general soundness and healthfulness of his mental constitution; his information, of vast superficies, though of small volume; his wit, scarcely inferior to that of the most distinguished followers of Donne; his eloquence, grave, deliberate, and commanding, could not save him from disgraceful failure as a rival of Shakspeare, but raised him far above the level of Boileau. His command of language was immense. With him died the secret of the old poetical diction of England-the art of producing rich effects by familiar words. In the following century, it was as completely lost as the Gothic method of painting glass, and was It was probably to this turn of mind, rather but poorly supplied by the laborious and tesse- than to the more disgraceful causes which lated imitations of Mason and Gray. On the Johnson has assigned, that we are to attribute ɔther hand, he was the first writer under whose the exaggeration which disfigures the paneskilful management the scientific vocabulary gyrics of Dryden. No writer, it must be | |